As he approached the fountain, a small figure in a red cape detached
itself suddenly from the mesh of shadows, and he recognized Patty Vetch,
the irrepressible young daughter of the Governor. He had seen her the
evening before at a charity ball, where she had been politely snubbed by
what he thought of complacently as "our set." From the moment when he
had first looked at her across the whirling tulle and satin skirts in
the ballroom, he had decided that she embodied as obviously as her
father, though in a different fashion, the qualities which were most
offensive both to his personal preferences and his inherited standards
of taste. The girl in her scarlet dress, with her dark bobbed hair
curling in on her neck, her candid ivory forehead, her provoking blunt
nose, her bright red lips, and the inquiring arch of her black eyebrows
over her gray-green eyes, had appeared to him absurdly like a picture on
the cover of some cheap magazine. He had heartily disapproved of her,
but he couldn't help looking at her. If she had been on the cover of a
magazine, he had told himself sternly, he should never have bought it.
He had correct ideas of what a lady should be (they were inherited from
the early eighties and his mother had implanted them), and he would
have known anywhere that Patty Vetch was not exactly a lady. Though he
was broad enough in his views to realize that types repeat themselves
only in variations, and that girls of to-day are not all that they were
in the happy eighties--that one might make up flashily like Geraldine
St. John, or dance outrageously like Bertha Underwood, and yet remain
in all essential social values "a lady"--still he was aware that the
external decorations of a chorus girl could not turn the shining
daughter of the St. Johns for an imitation of paste, and, though the
nimble Bertha could perform every Jazz motion ever invented, one would
never dream of associating her with a circus ring. It was not the things
one did that made one appear unrefined, he had concluded at last, but